Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this eagerly awaited English translation of Le Règne de l'homme, the last volume of Rémi Brague's trilogy on the philosophical development of anthropology in the West, Brague argues that, with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future. As scientific advances drained the cosmos of literal mystery, humanity increasingly devalued the theophilosophical mystery of being in favor of omniscience over one's own existence. Brague narrates the intellectual disappearance of the natural order, replaced by a universal chaos upon which only humanity can impose order; he cites the vivid histories of the nation-state, economic evolution into capitalism, and technology as the tools of this new dominion, taken up voluntarily by humans for their own ends rather than accepted from the deity for a divine purpose.
Brague's tour de force begins with the ancient and medieval confidence in humanity as the superior creation of Nature or of God, epitomized in the biblical wish of the Creator for humans to exert stewardship over the earth. He sees the Enlightenment as a transition period, taking as a given that humankind should be masters of the world but rejecting the imposition of that duty by a deity. Before the Enlightenment, who the creator was and whom the creator dominated were clear. With the advance of modernity and banishment of the Creator, who was to be dominated? Today, Brague argues, "our humanism... is an anti-antihumanism, rather than a direct affirmation of the goodness of the human." He ends with a sobering question: does humankind still have the will to survive in an era of intellectual self-destruction? The Kingdom of Man will appeal to all readers interested in the history of ideas, but will be especially important to political philosophers, historical anthropologists, and theologians.
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It does not go without saying that man distinguishes himself from the rest of what populates the earth, even less that he can claim to be better than the other living things. What had become something obvious to us and remained so until recently was the result of a process that I need to sketch.
A Unique Living Thing
I will lay out three logically distinct stages: man is singular among the other beings; he is superior to them; he dominates them.1 In this nested ensemble, the previous stage does not necessarily entail the one that follows, which therefore must come from elsewhere.
For Kant, “what is man?” is the fourth fundamental question of philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason had earlier posed three, concerning knowledge, action, and hope, each with a distinctive modality (is able to, ought to, is allowed to . . . ). In the fourth and last question, formulated later, the three concerns converge, and the three adjunct modalities are combined in the simple verb “to be.”2 Now, the question of knowing what man is was not raised in antiquity except rarely, and Colotes, friend of Epicurus, mocked a question that presupposed such an ignorance of oneself.3 The oldest occurrence is found, perhaps, in Psalm 8:5 (RSV): “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” The question, rhetorical, does not lead to a search for what constitutes man, but continues with a reflection on the place that God has accorded him. The psalm had begun by evoking the celestial bodies, in the light of which man is implicitly measured, and clearly to his disadvantage. On the other hand, man is situated just below the “gods” (doubtless, angels), and in any case above the terrestrial and aquatic animals. Seneca asks twice “what is man?” But he does so to affirm not a definition but human fragility.4
When antiquity sought to determine what the situation of man has that is unique, it put to work an entire series of notions and metaphors. All agreed in conferring on man an exceptional situation, but not always the place of honor. Thus, man is the most fragile of beings. Or again: while nature or the gods have given animals what they need to defend themselves, man is abandoned by stepmotherly nature; he is naked, like someone shipwrecked and tossed on the shore, obliged to fend for himself alone.5
Most of the time, however, what man has that is unique is seen as positive. He alone has commerce with the highest of the beings. Wisdom texts from ancient Egypt affirm that the world was made for man, whom God created in his image. Thus the Teaching for King Merikare (ca. 2060 BCE): human beings “are his copies, who have come from his body.” The Teaching of Ani (ca. 1300) specifies that the resemblance with the god does not hold only for the wise: “As for men, they are the doubles of god. . . . It is not only the wise who is his double.” The Egyptian word used designates a fixed representation of a god—in contrast to a mobile statue carried in procession—a word used when one says that the king is the image of a specific god.6 The idea of man created in the image of God is also found in the two sources the West has never forgotten: in the Bible (Gen. 1:27), but also in the pagan poetry of Ovid, who spoke, though, of gods.7
As a consequence, man is the best of the living things.8 The reason given for such an advantage varies. That man is what is best under the heaven is an idea found equally in Xunzi (Hsün Tzu), a Chinese philosopher of the third century BCE, who explains this superiority by the fact that man possesses the sentiment of duty.9 Most often, it is attributed to his capacity to receive excellence. This is a possibility that remains ambiguous, though, because it can turn on him and make him the worst of the beasts.10 It can also be the case that he is the best of all the sublunary beings, but not the best of all beings, because the celestial bodies are greater than he. For an ancient such as Chrysippus, the greatest arrogance for man is to imagine that there is nothing above him. But this claim is cited in a dialogue of Cicero by the skeptic Cotta, who responds that man at least has the advantage over the heavenly constellations of being conscious and intelligent; Pascal recalled this when he wrote: “The advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of it.”11
However, to be superior does not always mean to exercise a real, concrete domination. One can see in it merely a metaphor, as when one says: “He towers over the others.” To be superior would then be to possess a series of advantages that one can list (not without satisfaction), which seem to make man the gods’ favorite, and which even allow him to be seen as a kind of god vis-à-vis the other beings.12 The possession of these advantages is peaceful and uncontested.
After the invention of writing, literary works formulated the superiority of man in admiring evocations of his prowess at the hunt and in fishing, connected to the superiority of human astuteness over the intelligence of animals with lesser or more dense minds.13 His adventurous endeavors, such as navigation or the exploitation of mines, are also frequently evoked, from the book of Job to the Greek tragedies, and in China, where the idea is at least implicit in Mozi (Mo Tzu), in the fifth century BCE.14 These activities, are they the cause or the consequence of human superiority? It would seem that they merely express the adroitness of man, of him who is the most “formidable” of the living beings. In Sophocles, one cannot derive the idea of self-creation from the chorus that sings man’s capacity to “teach himself.” To be an “autodidact,” far from excluding inspiration from the gods, implies it.15 It is in this context that it is best to understand the enigmatic declaration of Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.”16 It caused many individuals to reflect, including Nicolas of Cusa.17 To begin with, the text of the fragment is not fully guaranteed. Plato, perhaps our sole source, interprets it as an argument for the relativism of sensations. In any case, the “things” in question are the “things” that one needs and makes use of. That man would be, for the things that are, the measure of what they are, that is still understandable. But that he would be for those that are not, the measure that they are not, that is more problematic. These “things” are perhaps only sensations, for example, those of hot and cold, of light and heavy, of which each individual is de facto the measure. In his last dialogue, Plato responds that it is not man, but God, who is of all things the most precise measure.18
Valorization
One can distinguish three stages in the valorization of man: the dignity of the human species, the nobility of an elite, the perfection of an individual. But the qualities that attach to these three moments (the universal, the class, the individual) indicate everything of which the human is capable, even if each person is not always at the height of such a valuation.
The idea of dignity most often implies a protest against a condition where it is denied. Historically speaking, after a prefiguration in Stoicism,19 the idea of an intrinsic and inalienable human dignity clearly appeared only in Christianity, which placed the accent on the liberty of the person.20 Its pertaining to the modality of “ought-to be” received a historical transposition in Christianity: dignity had been lost by the sin of Adam, then recovered by the sacrifice of Jesus. Thus it is the result of divine grace and the economy of salvation, which works itself out in history. It is because Christ gave his life to redeem him that man can recover his dignity wounded by sin. The fathers of the church invited Christians, who knew themselves to be situated in the economy of salvation, to be aware of their dignity. The term was still connected to its original meaning of social role, but went beyond it when one specified that this dignity is even prior to the coming into being of the one who bears it.21 These reminders were especially given at Christmas, for example in the sermons of St. Leo and St. Bernard: for human nature, the incarnation of the Word was the cause of an undreamed-of promotion.22
Thomas Aquinas recapitulates and powerfully synthesizes the ideas of human dignity when he asks, Why was it fitting that the Word became man? Citing Augustine and other Latin fathers, he shows that the incarnation was a particularly well-adapted way to enable man to progress in the good, even to divinization, by the practice of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and to heal him of evil, by freeing him from preferring the devil to himself and keeping him from tarnishing the dignity of human nature with sin.23 The dignity of man comes from his nature as an intermediary and a microcosm who contains a bit of everything in the world. In this way, he realizes in himself the union of all the universe, material and spiritual. This idea has a venerable antiquity. But in Christianity it received a new dimension, historical. The microcosmic nature of man prefigures the union of God with his creation, realized by the union of his Word with man.24 Thus Maximus the Confessor compares man to a workshop, because of the syntheses that he effects in himself, at all the levels of being. This workshop is already at work in him by his mere existence and not by his action, which is why it is wrong to make of the Byzantine theologian a precursor of the “theology of work.”25
The idea of nobility was initially social. Its ancient definition invoked the antiquity of the family and the exploits of the ancestors who made one “well born.”26 The Middle Ages added the possibility of arriving at nobility by the excellence of services rendered, to be thus “son of something” (in Spanish: hidalgo). In the fourteenth century, Dante and Meister Eckhart constructed a theory of the noble man.27 Averroës (Ibn Rushd), or rather his translators, by means of the idea of “nobility” had expressed the status of things as ideas of the divine intellect, before their realization by the creative act.28 Eckhart was inspired by this to identify the noble man, as the image of God, with the interior man, which he conceived as man insofar as he was in God before his creation.
The idea of the nobility of man thus transposed into the metaphysical order the structure which had been presented historically in the idea of dignity. With this important change: nobility lost its connection to heredity and became accessible to whoever would aspire to it by appropriate conduct. In any case, this understanding of nobility, far from entailing a claim of independence vis-à-vis God, to the contrary expresses the idea of a perfect submission to his will, or a perfect expression of the order of ideas according to which nature had been created.29 It was the same with the ancient idea of a “divine man,” which designated not a figure arrogating superhuman powers to himself, a thaumaturge or soothsayer, but the authorized transmitter of truths of divine origin that merely pass through him.30
The human perfection of Jesus Christ, model of virtue, was little discussed by Christianity, which sees in him a “true man and true God.” St. Paul distinguishes the “spiritual man” from the “natural man,” declaring that “the spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one” (1 Cor. 2:14–15 RSV). He thus furnishes the first formulation of the idea of sovereignty, and the text was often cited by defenders of the power of popes. The epistles of the captivity speak of Christians as having to become perfect human beings (Eph. 4:13; Col. 1:28).
The idea of the perfect human being was not clearly developed in the lands of Christianity. The formula “perfect in humanity” is found in the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451), but it signifies that Christ is “perfectly human” and not “perfect man.”31 However, one encounters it in the Anticlaudianus of Alain de Lille (1184), an allegorical poem on the creation of a perfect man by the reunion of the personified virtues, who send one of them, prudence, to heaven. Indeed, if the body of man is the work of nature, his soul must be sought with God. This perfect man ends by allying with the virtues to combat the vices and triumph over them. The idea reemerges with somewhat ...
